A collection of short stories by Ivan Raley

I was in a revival having a wonderful time just enjoying sharing the ‘Good News” as I entered the church the second night a man said to me you must have dreamed the story you told last night. I had told a couple of stories about my life as a boy at 246 South Lindsey Street so I asked him which story. All of them, he said, I goggled 246 South Lindsey, there is no such place, you just dreamed it up.
Had I dreamed it? Did we not dig a basement under the house on Lindsey, did my father not display his arrow head collection and children from the local school come out and see them? Didn’t dad have a shop in the back yard and wasn’t the back wall of our house made of stones my father had found? Had I dreamed that I met Johnnie Barber when I was five, that we lived next to one another until we both left home for college and adulthood; did Betty Upton not live across the street, the prettiest girl on Lindsey; how about the Smiths, they lived on the other side of us, Don sometimes called Jimmy and his brother Bobby, what about the Greens who lived North of Johnnie, did Charlie not get killed and all of us boys serve as his pallbearers; what about Bill Rowell, Wayne, Faye, Lynn, and so many others did we not play; how about the Evans they lived across the street, were they not real, was that just a dream, did Murray not died at Normandy, and Alice my sister, did she not sweep the front porch each day, ten times, just hoping that James Sharp who was coming to work at the Evans’ home, might notice her. What about Ralph, did he not deliver groceries and stay to talk to Peggy until Mr. Henry called for him to come and make another delivery. As wonderful as those days were simple, calm, beautiful, innocent, were they not real, and was all of those years and all of that time just a dream? Did mother not die in my arms on a Thursday night in May of 1977, what really did happen, was it a dream, was it true, have things changed so much that no one can believe how wonderful it was to live at 246 South Lindsey long ago in those years now gone? If so then let me fall asleep once again and close this long journey with the rest of the dream of Lindsey Street.